Back in the fall of 2008, Michael Bester and a business partner, both Army veterans doing contract work in Afghanistan, hit on the equivalent of the counterinsurgency’s trifecta: a way to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans, eliminate the illegal opium trade, and take the Taliban’s money. “We had been in villages where children were dying because they didn’t have proper medicine, because they didn’t have refrigerators,” Bester told me. Light up the villages, and perhaps you could empower Afghans to resist the Taliban. And the fuel? Most any feedstock would work, but one compelling option was the ubiquitous poppies that stoke the Taliban’s lucrative drug trade. Why not turn them into biodiesel instead?

Rudolf Diesel’s first engine ran on peanut oil; Bester wanted to be sure that poppies would function as well. So he and his partner consulted with experts, including an Australian plant geneticist named Philip Larkin, who had recently drafted a funding proposal titled “Biodiesel From Afghanistan Poppies.” Larkin knew that tractors in Tasmania, the site of the world’s largest legal opium industry, ran on poppy biodiesel. If it worked in Tasmania, it could work in Afghanistan: poppy seeds have an exceptionally high oil content (45 to 50 percent, compared with 40 percent in canola seeds), the oil has good “cold flow” properties (resistance to viscosity in cold weather), and, oh yeah, Afghanistan’s poppy crop could produce 100,000 tons of oil a year, or about 2.5 percent of annual global biodiesel consumption. Even the Pentagon’s budget-minders could benefit. The United States was paying perhaps as much as $400 to protect and deliver a single gallon of fuel to forward operating bases in rural Afghanistan, when a gallon of locally made biodiesel would have cost less than $10.

Under the banner of his company, Afghan Eco-Fuels, Bester shopped his idea around Kabul, albeit carefully. The U.S. ambassador at the time, William Wood, had served in Colombia previously and was committed to the Bush administration’s policy of aerial spraying and eradication of the poppy crop. Condoleezza Rice “got really huffy,” said one former senior official, whenever alternatives to eradication were suggested; earlier proposals to regulate the opium industry for pharmaceutical use had been shot down.

Then there were the Afghan politicians reportedly cashing in on the drug trade. “We didn’t specifically discuss poppy for biodiesel. That’s how people get killed by drug lords,” Bester said. He and his partner took a more tactful approach. “We said, ‘You find people to get us feedstock, and we’ll process it into biodiesel.’” But they had few takers. When they approached USAID about the idea, its bureaucrats were hesitant to back something so revolutionary. As Bester explained, “They wanted small things they could call a success: ‘Can you make ceramic pots?’” Dave Warner, a doctor, neuroscientist, and proponent of exploring poppy-to-biodiesel technology (“It’s just too fucking cool not to try!”) who has done extensive humanitarian work in eastern Afghanistan, ascribed even more significance to Bester’s string of rejections and characterized the idea as “opening up a micro Pandora’s box. We don’t have the intellectual robustness to deal with the war in Afghanistan,” he said. Eventually, Bester grew frustrated and more or less gave up.

But by early 2009, rhetorical, if not strategic, shifts were under way in Afghanistan. Upon taking office, the Obama administration quickly ended the poppy-eradication program. Then attacks on NATO diesel and supply convoys in Pakistan became a regular event. Other fuel options began to look more attractive. That spring, the CIA’s Office of the Chief Scientist began seriously exploring poppy-to-biodiesel technology. By the summer of 2009, it had put together a colorful, 12-slide PowerPoint that outlined the creation of a “biofuel industry that [would] replace opium as the principal agricultural product.” (The CIA declined my request to interview the lead scientist for the project.) Poppy fuel, according to the presentation, offered “excellent” value, “excellent” quantity and quality, and “positive” environmental impact.

Good ideas require funding, and for biodiesel to work, it needed a sponsor with a big budget. So Bester’s ears pricked up that summer when he heard that General James Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps, had pledged to “improve energy efficiency” for the Marines. Conway created the Expeditionary Energy Office, headed by a former fighter pilot named Colonel Bob “Brutus” Charette, to explore, test, screen, and deliver reusable energy sources to marines in Afghanistan. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Charette told me, “and Afghanistan is the moon.” Charette staged multiple experimental forward operating bases, in Northern Virginia and California, where engineers pitched their newest solar, wind, and water-filtration technologies.

Alternative fuels were a bit more complicated. Every military engine, whether in a jet, helicopter, tank, or generator, is designed, for purposes of standardization, to run on jet fuel, or JP-8. Filling the tank with anything else would entail some refiguring and greater maintenance. Biodiesel options were quickly dismissed because of several complex factors. (The most common way to make biodiesel involves methanol, which is also used to make improvised explosive devices.) Pure poppy-seed oil mixed with JP-8 remained an option, though. As Charette told me, “It was the quickest way to get there”—there being renewable, green energy—“because the amount of oil you can get out of poppy is pretty good. It’s easy to get and readily available.”

But even for Charette, poppy’s political problems loomed too large. “It just doesn’t sound good, the United States using poppy oil,” Charette told me. He eventually found a compromise: cottonseed oil. In late 2010, marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand province purchased their first batch of cottonseed oil from the newly opened gin in Lashkar Gah. They paid $1,200 for 168 gallons. The cottonseed oil, mixed in a 20/80 blend with JP-8, is currently powering air- conditioning units and other equipment for marines at Helmand’s Camp Leatherneck. Although the biological properties are less ideal than those of poppy, admitted Charette, “cotton oil achieves the effect we’re looking for strategically.”

I spoke with Michael Bester shortly after the Marines got started with the pilot project in Helmand. He had been tracking the news closely. If the Marines could prove that biofuels work on military bases, he figured that his poppy- to-biodiesel concept, which is more tailored to helping Afghans, might still stand a chance. “I’d love if we could go back over to Afghanistan and if people would understand our idea better,” he said. “I’d love to hear someone say, ‘Hey, this is viable. Those two guys who were here two years ago weren’t crazy.’”

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

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The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

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At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

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The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

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Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.